A half intoxicated woman, her front teeth missing and her colourless hair straggling, and her cheekbones gleaming with the high red of debauchery, leered up at him as he passed, as if in all her miserable being there could be one shred, or atom, to invite or attract. A curly-headed youngster, who would have been angelically beautiful if he had been washed and his native blood pumped from him, threw mud at the Reverend Smith Boyd, out of a mere artistic desire to reduce him to harmony with his surroundings. A mouthing old woman, with hands clawed like a parrot’s, begged him for alms, and he was ashamed of himself that he gave it to her with such shrinking. The master could not have been like this. A burly “pan handler” stopped him with an artificial whine. A cripple, displaying his ugly deformity for the benefit and example of the unborn, took from him a dole and a wince of repulsion.
“The poor ye have always with ye!” For ages that had been the excuse for such offences as Vedder Court. They were here, they must be cared for within their means, and no amount of pauperising charity could remove them from the scheme of things. In so far, Market Square Church felt justified in its landlordship, that it nursled squalor and bred more. Yet, somehow, the rector of that solidly respectable institution was not quite satisfied, and he had added a new expense to the profit and loss account in the ledger of this particular House of God. He had hired a crew of forty muscular men, with horses and carts, and had caused them to be deputised as sanitary police, and had given them authority to enter and clean; which may have accounted for the especially germ laden feel of the atmosphere this morning. Down in the next block, where the squad was systematically at work, there were the sounds of countless individual battles, and loud mouthings of the fundamental principles of anarchy. A government which would force soap and deodorisers and germicides on presumably free and independent citizens, was a government of tyranny; and it had been a particular wisdom, on the part of the rough-hewn faced man who had hired this crew, to select none but accomplished brick dodgers. In the ten carts which lined the curb on both sides, there were piled such a conglomerate mass of nondescript fragments of everything undesirable that the rector felt a trace better, as if he had erased one mark at least of the long black score against himself. Somehow, recently, he had acquired an urgent impulse to clean Vedder Court!